munists, but now we have found out that Life
under the dictatorship of business people is
no better. They couldn't care less about what
country they are in.

—Grigory Gorin, Russian writer, 1993

Spread
the truth—the Laws of economics are Like the Laws of engineering. One set of Laws works everywhere.

—Lawrence Summers, chief economist of
the World Bank, 1991

When Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev
flew to London
to attend his first

G7 Summit in July 1991, he had every
reason to expect a hero’s welcome.For the previous three years, he had
seemed not so much to stride across theinternational
stage as to float, charming the media, signing disarmament treaties and picking up peace prizes, including the Nobel in’
1990.

He had even managed to do the previously unthinkable: win over the

American public. The Russian
leader so thoroughly challenged Evil Empire caricatures that the U.S.
press had taken to calling him by a cuddly nick name, “Gorby,” and in 1987, Time magazine took the risky decision
of making the Soviet president their Man of the Year. The editors explained that unlike his predecessors (“gargoyles
in fur hats”), Gorbachev was Russia's

(p 219) own Ronald Reagan-“a
Kremlin version of the Great Communicator.” The Nobel Prize committee declared that thanks to his work, “It is
our hope that we are now celebrating the end of the Cold War.”

By the beginning of the nineties, with his twin policies of glasnost (open- ness) and perestroika
(restructuring), Gorbachev had led the Soviet Union through a remarkable process of democratization:
the press had been freed, Russia’s
parliament, local councils, president and vice president had been elected, and the constitutional court was independent. As
for the economy, Gorbachev was moving toward a mixture of a free market and a strong safety net, with key industries under
public control —a process he predicted would take ten to fifteen years to be completed. His end goal was to build social
democracy on the Scandinavian model, “a socialist beacon for all mankind.”

At first it seemed that the West also wanted Gorbachev to succeed in loosening up the Soviet
economy and transforming it into something close to Sweden’s.
The Nobel Committee explicitly described the prize as a way of offering support to the transition—“a helping hand
in an hour of need.” And on a visit to Prague, Gorbachev
made it clear that he couldn’t do it all alone:

“Like mountain climbers
on one rope, the world’s nations can either climb together to the summit or fall together into the abyss,” he
said.

So what happened at the G7 meeting in 1991 was totally unexpected. The nearly unanimous message
that Gorbachev received from his fellow heads of state was that, if he did not embrace radical economic shock therapy immediately,
they would sever the rope and let him fall. “Their suggestions as to the tempo and methods of transition were astonishing,”
Gorbachev wrote of the event.

Poland
had just completed its first round of shock therapy under the JMF’s and Jeffrey Sachs’s tutelage, and the consensus
among British prime ministerJohnMajor, U.S. president George H. W. Bush,
Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney and Japanese prime minister Toshiki Kaifu was that the Soviet Union had to follow Poland’s
lead on an even faster timetable. After the meeting, Gorbachev got the same marching orders from the IMF, the World Bank and
every other major lending institution. Later that year, when Russia
asked for debt forgiveness to weather a catastrophic economic crisis, the stern answer was that the debts had to be honored.’
Since the time when Sachs had marshaled aid and debt relief for Poland,
the political mood had changed—it was meaner.

What happened next—the dissolution of the Soviet Union,
Gorbachev’s eclipse

(p 220) by Yeltsin, and the tumultuous
course of economic shock therapy in Russia—is
a well-documented chapter of contemporary history. It is, however, a story too often told in the bland language of “reform,”
a narrative so generic that it has hidden one of the greatest crimes committed against a democracy in modern history. Russia, like China,
was forced to choose between a ChicagoSchool economic program and an authentic democratic
revolution. Faced with that choice, China’s leaders had
attacked their own I, people in order to prevent democracy from disturbing their free-market plans. Russia was different: the democratic revolution was, already well under way—in order
to push through a ChicagoSchool economic program, that peaceful and hopeful
process that Gorbachev began had to be violently interrupted, then radically reversed.

Gorbachev knew that the only way to impose the kind of shock therapy being advocated
by the G7 and the IMF was with force—as did many in the West pushing for these policies. The Economist magazine, in
an influential 1990 piece, urged Gorbachev to adopt “strong-man rule. . . to smash the resistance that has blocked serious
economic reform.”’ Only two weeks after the Nobel Committee had declared an end to the Cold War, The Economist
was urging Gorbachev to model himself after one of the Cold War’s most notorious killers. Under the heading “Mikhail
Sergeevich Pinochet?” the article concluded that even though following its advice could cause “possible blood-letting.
. . it might, just might, be the Soviet Union’s turn for what could be called the Pinochet approach to liberal economics.”
The Washington Post was willing to go further. In August 1991, the paper ran a commentary under the headline “Pinochet’s
Chile a Pragmatic Model for Soviet Economy.” The article
supported the idea of a coup for getting rid of the slow-going Gorbachev, but the author, Michael Schrage, worried that the
Soviet president’s opponents “had neither the savvy nor the support to seize the Pinochet option.” They
should model themselves, Schrage wrote, after “a despot who really knew how to run a coup: retired Chilean general Augusto
Pinochet.”

Gorbachev soon found himself facing an adversary who was more thanwilling to play the role of a Russian Pinochet. Boris Yeltsin, though holding
the post of Russian president, had a much lower
profile than Gorbachev, whoheaded all the Soviet Union. That was to change dramatically on August 19,1991,
one month after the G7 Summit. A group from the Communist old guard drove tanks up to the White House, as the Russian parliament
building is called. In a bid to halt the democratization process, they threatened to attack....

The
rest is tragedy, a country where the state adopted neoliberal deregulations and sold its resources for 10 cents on the dollar,
and the standard of living plummeted, where life expectancy dropped over 10 years, where poverty is the norm, and the promise
of growth was the deception to sell the neoliberal policies.This is the neoliberal
shock doctrine plan, a plan drawn up by the globalizers.Ms. Klein’s book
(also available as an audio book) should be on everybody’s book case well worn--jk.

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These International bankers and Rockefeller-Standard Oil interests control the majority of newspapers and use the columns
of these papers to club into submission or rive out of public office officials who refuse to do the bidding of the powerful
corrupt cliques which compose the invisible government -- Theodore Roosevelt, New York Times, March 27, 1922